iPad observations: has Steve Jobs already won the war?

I’ve got serious marketer envy happening here.

There are a lot of people out there doubting Steve Jobs right now, after the debut of the new iPad.  They’re trolling everything from its name to its feature set.  But the marketing game he and his team are playing on a level that’s well above many critics’ purview.  And that’s spoken as a guy who doesn’t use Apple hardware, because I’ve shed too many tears over dead hard drives and idiosyncratic design features.

But they miss the point.  Apple has already struck a powerful blow. Gen 1.0 will ship 4-6 million, easily. The big fail in criticisms to date is to be looking at it from the standpoint of a habituated PC user or fanboy geek…and that’s not the target; those scores of millions of iPod Touch and iPhone users will snap them up because it’s an extension of the UI they know and appreciate. Many of them don’t have laptops, even…but when they get one, who’ll they buy it from? Two guesses? Why even buy a laptop when they can get an iPad, whether 1.0 or 1.1 or 3.0?

By Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

So as for those who call it simply a juiced-up iPhone…well, it’s very much supposed to echo the iPhone experience. Jobs and crew said as much during the presentation. In fact, they’re counting on it, to leverage their existing loyalists.

They’re the classic example of the “lighthouse” brand that deliberately polarizes in order to secure more fervent adherents.  Their “enemy” is Everybody Else, and the hyperbole and self-confidence around the iPad launch, or any Apple launch, is part of making the Appleistas feel they’re part of a movement that goes beyond hardware or software or even the UI.

Every line of trolling or criticism they’re hearing right now is music to their ears, in fact, because it reinforces this strategy.  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody piped up with an objection to the much-disparaged “iPad” name in a meeting, and Jobs and his lieutenants laughed themselves silly with delight at the provocation and buzz it generates.  Does anybody think any of those 75 million iPhone or iPod Touch users — the people Apple is after as 1.0 first adopters here — is going to care about the name?

Others are coming out with tablets.   But…Lenovo?  HP?  Sorry, but I’ll lay odds they’ll repeat the same mistake they always make — delivering products that are laptop/PClike and striving to do too much at once, thinking like engineers and not designers, while using UIs which don’t can’t hold a candle to Springboard. This device isn’t for a person who embraces the PC experience. Does anyone have faith that a Dell or an Asus can successfully deliver a user experience that compares with an Apple?  Even if incorporating Android?

The Kindle?  Dead.  I’d dump mine ASAP for a device that can offer similar functionality and includes Web appliance features. The eBook market isn’t saturated – despite what some day — except among users who have considered or have bought e-ink-style ebooks. There are tens of millions of others who thought e-readers were indulgent devices at the price, would soon be supplanted, and who’ll gladly jump on iPad-type devices because they make more sense because of their broader utility.

Besides, the iPad needs to be seen in the greater context of what Apple has been trying to do over the last decade: not deliver a cool gadget, but deliver a transformative tool for living.  They know exactly what they’re doing – and who they’re doing it for.

The iPad is just another CONTENT spigot for Apple. No less, no more.  Observers and trolls who get hung up on the hardware completely miss the point of what they’ve been doing over the last decade or so. Hardware is mutable — becoming a familiar convenience you coexist with almost instinctually is the objective.  Steve Jobs has been connecting content with lifestyle appliances in ways heretofore never seen, and so successfully that it’s foolish to bet against him with this one.